Last night I spent about three hours working on my PC. The replacement drive from Western Digital finally arrived, but I’m definitely not happy about two things:
- The replacement drive is a “refurbished” drive and I expected WD to send a new one
- The drive was reported as “failed” and the RAID volume was degraded after about an hour of use
Why the heck did WD send me a refurbished drive, which is older than my dead drive and has a really old firmware, I don’t know. Worst of all, if this refurbished drive is dead, I’m pretty much screwed, because the warranty on the refurbished drive expires much earlier. So much for the five year warranty…
After I created the RAID volume, partitioned the drive and installed 64 bit Windows Vista, I started having some strange performance issues. The system would freeze every once in a while and the hard drive light would stay on for 5-10 seconds, preventing me from being able to work on the PC. The mouse cursor would move, but everything else was not responding. I have never experienced such a weird “lag” before and I knew something was wrong. After installing SP1 and SP2 on Vista, I downloaded the Intel Matrix Storage driver and it immediately reported that the new drive was bad. I think the lag was happening because of a bad RAID controller driver, but I’m not 100% sure. I then deleted the RAID volume and recreated it, repartitioned the drive and reinstalled Windows again. This time, I installed the RAID drivers along with the chipset drivers first and things were working much smoother. I did not get any reports on drive failure and everything seems normal. I will do some heavy file writing later today and see if the new drive fails. I hope it does so that I could call WD and have them send me a new drive instead…god knows how these refurbished drives perform.
Obviously this time, I reconfigured RAID for RAID 1 (mirroring). Although I lost half of the space, I’m just not comfortable losing any kind of data anymore. And the downtime I had with my PC is also unacceptable. With RAID 1, if one of the drives fail, I can continue to work on the PC and replace the drive whenenever I get a replacement. The system will automatically copy everything into the new drive for redundancy, once a new drive is connected. I’m also planning to schedule routine backups and have a mirrorred external volume for my photography needs.
About Nasim Mansurov
Can you suggest any software to automaticly backup data on PC?
WebMonster: give a shot to Acronis “True Image Echo Workstation” and see how you like it. It works great for me and I like how it copies everything on my PC, sector by sector.